Tagging in AO3 (off topic)

[threecee]

This is a bit of a rant on tagging in AO3 for which I couldn't find a better place.

In reading in various fandoms on AO3, I have found the number and quality of tags is an indicator of the quality of the writing and the probable maturity of the writer.

MfU writers tend to use warnings, standardized tags for main character names, relationships, and genre such as: H/C, humor, episode tag. Sometimes a note field. It is easy to search for stories that include the tags "Napoleon Solo" and "humor" and get stories that include those things.

In other fandoms, to pick on ST:TNG as an example, writers sometimes name every single character with so much as a non-speaking crowd scene appearance, no formal relationship or genre tags, and multiple details about the characters behavior in the story: "Data is clueless," "Geordie is so in love with Data" "Geordie is a jerk", "Good friend Troi", "Data is autistic". They also use comments about the writer's feelings: "I ship these guys forever", "But I love him", "I don't know why I wrote this" [avoid anything with this tag], "No beta we die like men", "LOL", and the very obvious "I don't know how to tag". There are NEVER any note fields when this kind of tagging is present.

Many of those tags are unique and therefore not indexed, even with popular ones there are a lot of spelling and wording variations, so even looking for stories where Data is autistic only gets a partial result. Searching on LOL gets a huge mishmash of story types most of which aren't humor, so I have no idea what it means. Maybe the joke is on the reader for wasting time reading the story?

This occurs with other fan fic I've read, but ST:TNG seems to have more of it than the older shows. Newer shows seem to have even more weird non-searchable tags. I think this is the reason that AO3 started setting tag limits.

I thought hashtags were developed on social media to help people follow specific stories and themes, so I don't understand why so many are unsearchable. [End rant]

Comments

[timemidae]

As a possible offender, I think it’s a cultural thing that most comes from Tumblr, where the tag based search system has been a mess since its inception and it’s generally normal to use tags for bits of commentary, in part due to other site architecture that makes commenting in other ways somewhat unwieldy.

[vysila]

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered, but yes, the tag system on Tumblr is all about commentary rather than searches, so I can see that.

It doesn't make up for the complete irritation with so many useless tags on AO3, but now I understand the reasoning a little better.

[threecee]

My irritation is probably that I was a librarian and then a library database manager, so I expect tags to be like subject tracings: the point is to find things, to be able to create a list of specific things.

[vysila]

It seems there is no logical system devised that cannot be turned on its ear by the users!

[tinturtle]

That's interesting. You are probably right that it is the root of some of this behavior, especially the practice of writing what is unambiguously a note in the tags so that many of the tags that are just disjointed phrases.

[threecee]

Ah, being accustomed to incising notes onto clay tablets in ancient Sumerian to communicate, I wasn't aware of the structure on Tumblr.

I couldn't look at much since I didn't register because I do NOT need yet another password, but I see some tags like LOL. Is it like Twitter where people retweet posts, and then others retweet the retweets endlessly, with everyone just adding tags to express themselves?

[timemidae]

Basically, yeah. If you add a comment to the post it will get reblogged along with the original and the post will grow until it’s too big for anyone to want to scroll through, so people use tags to add transient comments when they reblog something, since tags don’t get automatically reblogged with the post itself.

[threecee]

That seems like a poor way to set it up. At least DW and LJ thread posts and keep it pretty neat.

[timemidae]

In my experience people use the site pretty differently than they do LJ or DW - it’s more like Twitter than a place for forums or comms

[dancingpony]

I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of the non-tagging offense (which my “auto correct” wants, really demandingly, to change to “non-fagging offense.” Hmm) But I digress. I’m not really immature, age-wise. My “issue” is, that when I started posting on AO3, I’d only posted in two other forums, in the distant past, neither of which encouraged or facilitated tagging. So I didn’t even think about it. After I’d posted a few things, I did notice that tags are used a lot on AO3, so I started tagging most stories and even went back and added tags to a few older ones. But I’m still what you might call a hit-or-miss tagger. I am trying to do better.

[threecee]

Not at all. Your tagging is very clean. Fandom and major characters are the main things people look for, I believe, and you have those. A few tags like humor, action/adventure, or romance help people narrow down their search, but better too little than too much. Your Wicked Witch Affair has Witches and Wicca tags, so when I want to recommend that story by Dancingpony that was about a witch, I can find it without any trouble.

If you go to the fandom, like MfU and look at the search bar on the right, you can click on the additional tags to see what are the most commonly relevant ones. Same for relationships or characters.

[dancingpony]

It’s only reasonably clean now because I went through my story list a while back and did quite a bit of tagging. If you’d looked six months ago, the tagging was almost nonexistent. As I said, I’m trying to do better — although I haven’t figured out a way to tag a collection of drabbles, since there isn’t any 100% common element other than “short.” On the other hand, if someone really wanted to find a drabble collection, I think my two might show up if someone put “drabble” in the “any field” search bar.

[threecee]

I think you could just add it to the regular tags if you wanted since it is a kind of genre. You do have them listed as series already I think. However, your tags are very clear and better too few than a lot of garbage.